Japanese Public Opinion and Policies on Security and Defence

Even though the polling of public opinion as an aid to democratic politics was beginning to be practised in some Western countries during the 1930s, it made scarcely any progress in Japan until after the 1945 defeat.1 The militaristic and authoritarian principles on which government was increasingly based as the 1930s wore on could scarcely have been less conducive to the principle or practice of seeking to find out objectively what the population at large thought and felt about particular issues. There was, it is true, a complex network of communication between communities at the local level linked ultimately to nationwide organisations. Local community groups called burakukai, chōnaikai and tonarigumi had become by the wartime period essentially the lowest-level instruments of government control, functioning as mobilisers of the population to perform tasks required by the government rather than in any real sense as a means of finding out what ‘public opinion’ was thinking. To a large extent local control through the Ministry of Home Affairs had by the late 1930s come to replace the increasingly moribund political party networks, so that structures of communication having at least some representative purpose came to be replaced by structures whose sole function was mobilisation and control.2